This is the point that the parent was making. How you define "value" is the topic of discussion here, which in my opinion has become so abstract that it's impossible become successful around. Investors make money on failing businesses, software engineers make money on products that never monetize, top AI researchers make millions working for 2 weeks at one company doing training modules before moving to another.
In the modern economy, money is made by ideas, concepts, potentials. Not value.
Speculation, which you lean heavily on in your example, is essentially just gambling. (I'll get my driveway fixed up for $120, and -educated guess- it allows me to fix two cars for $80 each).
Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.
99% of the time when you are confused about why something has low value, or why something has high value, you can dig into the market around it and find out why and it's almost always pretty logical (and if it's not, congrats, you can make money on fixing it). This is also fuzzy around the edges, it's never sharp lines. But the shape is consistent on the whole.
To me what you're describing sounds like market price discovery versus value, which can also be functional usefulness or social worth, in the vein of the diamond–water paradox. A price is what someone is willing to pay, but value is something's worth. For example while selling a car if nobody is currently interested nearby it's market value is $0, but it's functional value as transportation persists.
On the other hand I might pay much less for something than its value would be through price discovery. For example I might be willing to pay an extremely high price for a life saving medication, but rules or laws deliberately limit price discovery, because leaving it to the market would be considered unjust for similar reasons to laws regarding externalities via the tragedy of the commons.
>if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
This is already somewhat done with teachers. Those who teach wealthy children such as at a prep or private school make more money than those who teach poor children. The salary does not directly scale with the quality of teaching - for example a 2x better teacher might make 10x the salary, because the bidding power of the wealthy parent is much greater.
Because currency is unevenly distributed, voting with dollars reflects the wealth and preferences of those with more money, skewing prices. In an extreme example if person A can pay $1,000 for a life-saving treatment and person B $10,000, does that make person B’s outcome ten times more valuable? In that sense, market prices aren’t neutral measures of value and are more like an economic version of ‘might makes right'.
Pretty much everyone agrees teachers are valuable, but their economic value is relatively low or their market is distorted. As hellishly capitalistic as it sounds, a teacher that could reliably produce all star workers would probably be paid handsomely as a student conveyor belt to Megacorp, by Megacorp.
Also medicine breaks discussions of markets/economics, the value of a shot that saves your is infinite.
There’s no reason a society couldn’t be organized around labor values—other than the fact that such societies (or the movements that would give rise to them) are routinely destroyed or destabilized by one pre-existing superpower or the other.
Capitalist realism, in other words.
You can't escape that people will evaluate how useful goods are to them. Goods which are priced way lower than their utility will get snapped up, goods priced way higher than their utility will go unsold.
Those who like this system, is this inevitable? If not, how can it be reversed? Or is it somehow good that the people who basically raise your kids for you get paid 10x less than the guy who takes a commission for plugging your investment account into their automated market tracking money printing machine?
There is no conspiracy or scheme going on. Most people who set out to become a teacher or sewage plant worker are successful in doing so. Very few people who set out to be investment banker VP or real estate moguls succeed, but we hyper focus on those who do, ignoring (more likely unaware of) the graveyard of broke losers who didn't make it.
On the flip-side, if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
And the pressure is enormous, you're in charge of making sure the kids get the tools they need for their life, all while making sure they can survive the arbitrary stuff like standardized testing.
If it was so easy why is there a shortage?
https://onlabor.org/wall-streets-dangerous-grind-the-human-t...
I acknowledge that investment bankers have a toxic work culture, but I don't believe the job is inherently harder than teaching, which is unavoidably hard in many ways. Some of the ways are solvable by having more teachers (smaller class sizes, not needing to take work home), but not all of them.
The third paragraph argues for even more market mechanics involved in this labor market which I of course disagree would improve the situation.
Also there's a serious shortage of teachers in the USA which undermines your point imo.
"Creating value" is such a subjective phrase. Societal value? Fiscal value?
Someone who drives around your city for 12 hours, rescuing and resuscitating people in life-or-death situations probably provides more societal value than a software engineer who builds CRM features for large social companies but we all know which one gets paid more and who is considered "more successful."
Maybe the problem is exactly that people are rewarded based on this other type of value, and that it is increasingly hard to define it, and be the one to provide it.